This was the big one for me – the proximate cause, the inciting event, the tipping point. I chose it at random in an airport bookstall in Miami. It turned out to be the twenty-first and last installment in the Travis McGee series, which ran from 1964 to 1985. McGee was a boat bum from Florida, taking his retirement in advance by working only when he had to, usually by retrieving stolen property from thieves and fraudsters. He was a big, scruffy, rawboned character. The series as a whole stands as one of the finest ever. It’s markedly ahead of its time about nature and the environment (but very much of its time about gender relationships, jarringly now) and it’s technically fascinating in that generally nothing happens on page one, yet you already can’t put the book down. But for me, some happy alignment of the planets meant that while I was thoroughly enjoying the series as pure entertainment, I was also seeing the skeleton beneath the skin. It was like a blueprint. Suddenly, and really for the first time ever, I saw exactly what a novelist was doing, and why, and when, and how. Maybe I could do that too, I thought.
Comments from our Guest Editor, Lee Child
| Primary Genre | Crime and Mystery |
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